Cupcake Couture (46 page)

‘No, there’s definitely something missing,’ he said again.

‘What are you talking about? What’s missing?’

‘One final, magic ingredient,’ he said, ‘to make it perfect, to make it taste even sweeter.’

My lips pursed as he smiled and lowered the cake. He leaned towards me and then kept on leaning until he was so close, I could no longer see my breath in the air between us.

‘What are you…?’ I began but his finger reached up and pressed against my lips.

I shivered. Zachary cupped his hand around my cheek. I blinked up into his breathtaking eyes, I inhaled his oaky scent. He moved closer still and pressed his soft lips against mine. I gave in to the sweetest kiss I had ever tasted.

Zachary was right; we had found the perfect recipe.

EPILOGUE

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I awoke on Christmas Day and rolled over under the Egyptian cotton duvet to see what Santa Claus had left me while I slept. It was the beautiful man lying beside me, his eyes closed, a smile playing on the lips I had kissed until my own had almost gone into spasm. The expensive duvet cover had been pulled down by his bare arm to reveal a broad, shapely chest that was even more edible than I had imagined. I ran my hand down his arm and smiled.

From the first sweet kiss, I had known I wanted him. Our kisses on the platform had become more urgent and more passionate. In fact, if I had been watching myself I would have grimaced and muttered – ‘Get a room’ – under my breath, which very soon afterwards we did.

I climbed out of the enormous bed that was big enough for a family of four (my parents would have loved it), pulled on my clothes, scribbled Zachary a note and slipped as quietly as I possibly could in wellies and a puffa jacket, out of the room. I found the back staircase leading down to the courtyard and the quadruple garage, where I located my little Golf with the ignition key resting in full view on the windscreen wiper. There was no danger, I supposed, of any of the Doyle neighbours stealing the sort of car they only saw on
Crimewatch
.

My parents looked both shocked and, I was glad to note, delighted when I arrived at their home in Embleton.

‘Merry Christmas,’ I called out as I opened the boot and began to extract bits of wire and feathers, ‘I brought your tree back.’

Together, Jango, Jemima, Julian and I rebuilt the tree I had hated every year at this time but which had now become instrumental in changing my life. I had made six cupcake decorations, which I placed on the branches, two for each of them. One was simply iced with their name and a heart, the other I had decorated personally. Julian’s had a map of Sri Lanka on the top, Jango’s had a paintbrush and easel, while Jemima’s had Madonna and a spliff.

‘Didn’t we say your aura was yellow?’ my father nodded knowingly when I kissed them goodbye at the door and left them to their dinner of nut roast, curried lentils and hash cakes, ‘Hopefulness, new ideas and positivity. You see, it came true.’

I nodded, conceding the point.

‘Yes but today, it’s different again,’ said my mother. She wafted her hands around my head. ‘It’s more bright pink.’

‘Oh really and what does that mean?’ I smiled wryly.

‘Sensitivity, sensuality, a sexual revival,’ she laughed, wiggling her eyebrows.

‘Merry Christmas!’ I cooed, hiding my blushes as I bolted down the path.

I ate Christmas dinner with Zachary and his family at the Doyle mansion. Mrs Doyle was the true matriarch but very welcoming and delightful company. She fed me twenty different types of potatoes and would have kept on feeding me until I exploded had Malachy (who had come dressed as Snow White) not decided to clear the table and dance on it. Hurley spent most of the day either talking about Heidi (who had spent Christmas with her parents as her last one before she would herself become Mrs Doyle) or talking to Heidi on the telephone, while Zachary spent a lot of the day
sneaking kisses from me whenever the others weren’t looking. We played games, sang songs and Hurley showed us his new wheelchair dance routine that he had been working on with Diversity. I was made to feel part of the family, which was wonderful for two reasons; 1) because I suspected I would belong to this family for quite some time to come and 2) because it made me realise every family has its quirks. Whether it be serving every form of potato known to man while the middle male child dances on the table dressed as a Princess or whether it be ‘adopting’ a young man from Sri Lanka and holding life drawing classes for stoners in your living room.

There was no ‘normal’ or ‘perfect’ family. Families were just a group of human beings with different hopes, dreams and personalities trying to get through life and find their way, at best as great friends, at worst without killing each other. Jango and Jemima had done their best, just as Roxy and Thierry would try and do their best by their baby, and Heidi and Hurley would hopefully have the chance to do with the four children they dreamed of having, and Zachary and I…

Please, my imagination was running wild but not
that
wild.

I had finally reached the point in my life where I could accept my family and stop blaming them for being themselves. Nevertheless, I didn’t suddenly leap up from the dinner table and drag Zachary out to Embleton to meet Jemima and Jango Baker. That moment would wait until I could guarantee that Zachary liked me enough not to run a mile when he saw the penis doorknob and that my mother could be trusted not to start fashioning a naked sculpture of him out of Plasticine while we was there.

In May, Roxy gave birth to a baby girl, whom she called Dixie. I made cupcakes for the baby shower before the birth and then I made a stunning cake installation for the christening three months later when I also stood at the font between a Vicar and my (until then) atheist friend, and vowed to be, perhaps not perfect, but the best Godmother I could be.

Roxy then floored me by asking if she could work for me from time to time as a sales person for
Cupcake Couture
. She said she wanted to be a better role model for her daughter than just being a WAG. How could I say no? It was Roxy’s first proper job. In reality, she often failed to turn up and when she did she spent most of the time doing anything but selling cakes, but I was impressed with her desire to be a good mother and her endless banter and sarcasm kept me entertained and with my feet firmly on the ground.

I was becoming a better cupcake couturière by the day as orders flooded in and my business expanded into the kitchens of the Doyle mansion. Mrs Doyle had had quite enough of rattling around ‘like a pea in a maraca’. She was great with her hands, having been a seamstress and she was a talented cook, so she was also there to lend a hand with weighing, mixing, whisking, decorating and, of course, tasting. We held regular cake tasting groups both at her home and at my flat, which Heidi, Roxy and my neighbours attended every fortnight. It was like the book groups that had become fashionable everywhere, only we ate cakes and talked about cakes and then drank wine and, of course, gossiped until we were hungry enough to eat more cakes. Charlie’s basil plants supplied the herbs for many of my savoury cupcakes and Ching’s Cantonese recipes inspired a whole new line of Asian flavoured sponges.

I was already onto my third notebook and Zachary was in the final talks with a publisher about publishing the first of many
Cupcake Couture
recipe books, containing my own drawings, scribbled notes and coffee stains, just like the ones I used at work. Every book would have a pocket inside the back cover to contain the reader’s own clippings and inspirations and the books would tie with a ribbon just like mine. I could hardly believe the scribbles of my childhood would soon be gracing bookshop shelves. A fact that I thought I might keep secret from Jango until (please God) he sold a piece of his own art. With Jango and Jemima’s help, however, Julian was fast becoming a renowned artist and sold his work regularly. My parents did not officially adopt him but he did become a real member of our family.

My gorgeous flat of course remained my sanctuary but it was perhaps less pristine than it had once been, with the comings and goings of the neighbours and the regular presence of a broad-shouldered man of Irish descent who left muddy shoes by the door and socks under the bed and wet towels on the uneven floorboards of the bathroom. I wouldn’t have changed it for the world.

My celebrity client base grew at quite a frightening but exciting pace after Cheryl Cole publicly endorsed
Cupcake Couture
as her favourite brand of cupcake at her New Year’s party. I had made her a beautiful tower of white and silver cupcakes decorated with delicate, sugar butterflies, which had been inspired by her outfit at the 3D Christmas event. The photos of Cheryl posing in front of the cake tower, which dwarfed her tiny frame and of her biting into the thick swirls of buttercream flooded onto the Internet and were also published in
Glamour, Grazia
and most of the tabloid Press. The day the story broke, my website was overloaded, Zachary and I celebrated
with a slap up meal at the Baltic restaurant (with a bottle of champagne that did not cost the GNP of a small country) and the
Cupcake Couture
name went global. I would like to say it made me rich overnight but of course it didn’t. I had a lot of hard work and ingredients to put in before I would be calling Coutts & Co, but everything was heading in the right direction and my bank balance was at last starting to look healthy again. As were Cheryl’s young girl fans who decided to stick two fingers up at Kate Moss and say – ‘Sorry, Kate, but cupcakes taste a damn sight better than skinny feels!’

At the end of May, I then made an entire Newcastle squad, including the management, out of black and white football cupcakes on a giant cupcake pitch for the party to celebrate Newcastle’s successful season in the Premiership. Alan Shearer gave a speech at the party and reminisced about discussing the cake for the party with Thierry back in December at the training ground. He toasted the club’s success in front of the cameras with a glass of bubbly in one hand and one of my cupcakes in the other. Shearer, Thierry, Doughballs, Chesney et al had no qualms about being nicknamed Team Cupcake. My brand was not yet labelled ‘by appointment to Her Majesty the Queen’ but I had the endorsement of King Alan Shearer and Queen Cheryl Cole, which, in the North East, was just as powerful.

Heidi threw herself wholeheartedly into planning a wedding to rival all weddings for herself and Hurley. She dusted off her own childhood scribbles and planned everything down to the tiniest detail, except for the cake, which she left to me. I was still in the planning stages and it was becoming my most difficult order yet. Designing cakes for celebrities I could do, but designing a cake for the most important day of
one of my best friend’s lives was something altogether more important. Especially when that friend was Heidi whose whole life had been devoted to giving to others. The fact that I was also dating her fiancé’s brother (which was not, as I discovered awkward but simply strengthened our bond) added pressure. I would design her a cake that was unforgettable and exceptional and fabulous. Simple!

As for the rest of the country, the coalition Government continued to promised change, growth, a better economy, less debt and more jobs but with little yet filtering down to the little man. The recession was apparently showing official signs of coming to an end and the bankers had started claiming extortionate bonuses again. Things were looking up for most, although I still spared a thought for the people like myself who had been made redundant without so much as a
thank you for giving us your precious time
and who had not yet been as lucky as I to find a new direction. I suspected there would be ups and downs, dips and double and triple dips in the economy in years to come, but then that was what life was all about. It was how we rode through those dips that mattered. How we got from A to B, whether by a Roman Road or a Spaghetti Junction.

I had changed since my days at Blunts. I valued people and time more than I ever had. The stages of my life were becoming defined by recipes and cake designs, every one of which stuck in my memory either for how it looked and tasted or, more importantly and much more frequently, for the event it represented. I still hankered for a routine but my new routine inevitably embraced a certain amount of chaos because I was dealing with cake recipes and often with celebrities. My new workplace was a kitchen full of polka dot mixing bowls and buttercream and sprinkles. It was not an open plan,
strip-lighted, non-descript space painted in company colours with a restricted view of the Newcastle Quayside, which I had at once considered to be a home away from home but which now I did not miss in the slightest.

Oh and as for Chris Rea and the driver next to him… well, they’re just the same.

THE END